Not only does the credit bureau max out their password length, you have a small list of available non-alphanumeric characters you can use, and no spaces. Also you cannot used a plused email address, and it had an issue with my self hosted email alias, forcing me to use my gmail address.
Both Experian and transunion had no password length limitations, nor did they require my username be my email address.
Update: I have been unable to log into my account for the last 3 days now. Every time I try I get a page saying to call customer service. After a total of 2 hours on hold I finally found the issue, you cannot connect to Equifax using a VPN. In addition there is no option for 2FA (not even email or sms) and they will hang up on you if you push the issue of their security being lax. Their reasoning for lax security and no vpn usage is “well all of our other customers are okay with this”.
Imagine having to contract with a company in order for them not to fuck your life up with your own data. This is ridiculous.
You signed a contract? Pretty sure they’re going to fuck it up either way and they definitely have all your data.
that they collect without your explicit consent
Reminds me of this
the Ring app (I think) forced me to change my Wi-Fi password because I wasn’t allowed to use ampersands. according to support it’s because they “use ampersands in the code”
Sure would be a shame of Bobby tables made a ring acct
You mean the company that had a feature in place that allowed law enforcement to request and access video footage from your devices without obtaining a warrant first?
Yeah, no thanks.
It deeply saddens me when people pay money for locked down hardware that’s not only designed to spy on them, but their family, friends, and neighbors as well. Ring, Amazon Echo, Google Home, that creepy Facebook robot screen…all insecure spyware.
yeah I only have a ring for my outdoor cameras. I was considering switching my indoor system yo ring as my alarm company keeps raising their prices but I’m not putting ring cameras inside my house. especially because the privacy shutters on them are manual
Then wash the code! Son’s of bitches!
Eufy cameras will not allow spaces in the WiFi password.
Thats the least of your worries with Ring. Put that shit straight into the bin.
That implies that they pass parameters in URLs… FFS.
I encountered something like this at work. It wasn’t pass related, it was just a means of getting people to make text responses. Ampersands were replaced with some gibberish format, which annoyed everyone.
I got some kind of explanation from our tech people, which I understood to mean that ampersand was used to indicate that what followed was live code. Turning the ampersand into gibberish text was a safety measure to stop mischief.
I’ve noticed ampersand replacements in some news feeds too
Removed by mod
And I use password manager, I don’t care of its 52 chars long, I just use the software to fill the field
Removed by mod
I recommend Diceware for generating memorable passwords of sufficient complexity…but also, a password manager.
I use a 5 word phrase generated by my password locker. I will add a symbol or three to it if required.
I also like that the only type of MFA that all 3 agencies implement is text/phone call. Cause likes there’s nonway someone could spoof a phone number and then unfreeze your credit.
Financial companies ans banks and stuff have to follow regulations on their MFA method. That why you can’t just use any OTP authenticator and are stuck with email/SMS.
In case anybody’s curious about what those are:
- https://rublon.com/blog/nydfs-23-nycrr-part-500-mfa-compliance/
- https://metomic.io/resource-centre/financial-services-compliance-regulations
- https://rublon.com/blog/ffiec-mfa-compliance-best-practices/
- https://www.ffiec.gov/press/pdf/Authentication-and-Access-to-Financial-Institution-Services-and-Systems.pdf
The biggest reason they use phone calls or SMS, however, is because they don’t want to go to the hassle of getting an in-house MFA service (a TOTP backend, in other words), approved, pen tested, analyzed, verified… all things considered, it’s faster and easier to go with a service like Twilio that already did all that legwork. A couple of years back I worked for a company in just that position, and after we did all the legwork, research, and consultation with the independent third party specialists trying to run our own TOTP would have easily doubled the yearly cost because of all the compliance stuff.
Adding TOTP would be cheaper in the long run than continuing to pay those SMS rates. I dont think its about any kind of extra hassle they have to deal with. More of terrible NIST standards written by the center for internet security, which is a for profit corporation that apparently nist allows to write all their standards
It really depends on the company. When I was working for that company a few jobs back, we crunched the numbers and the cost of C&C and IV&V (Certification and Accreditation; Independent Verification and Validation) for an in-house TOTP had one more zero to the left of the decimal point than the Twilio bill (added up for the year). Plus, for compliance we’d have to get everything re-vetted yearly.
That’s kinda of the definition of government contracting. :) I think the only US government org that has actual govvies doing anything other than management is NASA.
Yeah except you only have to spend the money once as opposed to paying twilio every year
for compliance we’d have to get everything re-vetted yearly
I had an account there with a proton email address and suddenly I couldn’t log in anymore. After 6 months of calling, someone finally told me proton emails are blocked because they are not secure. So I changes it to a tutanota email
What a clusterf**k
I almost used my proton mail because I can create an alias, where equifax would not accept a plused gmail account.
Oh boy. If you think this is bad, you should try waiting a few weeks or months after you’re signed up this time, then sign up for a new account using your current details, just with a different email. Spoiler: if you can answer the security questions, you’re home free.
And remember that between the Equifax leak and more recent hacks, at this point, every sensitive detail for every member of the economy is now in the hands of bad actors. If they want your shit, or into it, they’ll social engineer it.
Should passwords have maximum character counts? Sure, to prevent overflow attacks (or whatever) by pasting five different analyses of the movie Primer as your password. It should be longer than 20 in any case. But are there other, way worse security issues? Yes.
I swear password restrictions are getting to the point where there’s eventually going to only be one usable password.
Yeah, it’s counterproductive to lay out a bunch of restrictions. Let people make a long-ass password that’s a memorable phrase - it’s safer anyway.
Although I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.
I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.
Password reuse. Password reuse everywhere.
We’re all guilty of it. No shame in admitting it. I know I’ve been guilty of it from time to time.
When I have to sign up for something on my phone I will use my pre Bitwarden default password. Then once I have a sec to sit down iPad or laptop I will change it to something more secure.
I am currently fighting with my wife and children to start using a password manager.
On your phone, you can select autofill, then ask bitwarden to generate a password, save and use that to register
The funny thing about that is that I am currently on my laptop getting keepassxc set up. This post has somehow motivated me to finally get a password manager.
If it converts one person that is a good thing.
What’s the best password manager you’d recommend?
I have only used lastpass (they have had several breeches and I do not recommend them), Bitwarden (my current daily driver and my recommendation), and I have used Apple keychain a little for passwords at work that my wife can access without having full access to my Bitwarden.
Thank you!
At least they show you their requirements. Usually I use passwords with up to 150 characters (including special ones). Getting a vague response like “Password is invalid” is so annoying. I then have to remove special characters and reduce the length step by step until it is accepted by the website. (But 20 characters is way too short, resulting in these hilarious other requirements. You just want to create an account, without having to do a PhD in creating passwords first.)
There shouldn’t be an arbitrary limit on the length of a password but how is 20 characters “way too short”? It’s more than 10^36 combinations.
It doesn’t even matter. Because the limit implies that they don’t hash and salt their passwords.
Plus they had a breach already in 2017.
Twitch is bad about this. It’s not a fucking ballistic missile installation - just tell me what you want.
This implies they’re storing the plaintext password.
Ideally the password would be hashed with a salt and then stored. Then it’s a fixed length field and it shouldn’t matter how long the password is.
Salted passwords are not recommended anymore. Better to use a memory hard key derivation function designed for passwords, like Argon.
I’d rather see a paper explaining the flaws with salted passwords rather than “just use this instead”.
My initial reaction is that this overcomplicates things for the majority of use-cases, and has way more to configure correctly compared to something basic like a salted sha256/sha512 hash that you can write in any language’s standard library.
If the database of everyone’s salted password hashes gets leaked, this still gives everyone plenty of time to change passwords before anything has a chance of cracking them. (Unless you’re about to drop some news on me about long time standard practices being fundamentally flawed)
Wut. Is the competition not enough data for you? This is how we got AES.
Can you name a single popular language where Argon2 isn’t implemented in a stamdard library?
Those are salted, they just do it for you.
Where does the salt get stored?
It’s usually part of the string stored to the DB.
Edit: you can see the PHC spec here:
https://github.com/P-H-C/phc-string-format/blob/master/phc-sf-spec.md
Which is a common format for various password storage algorithms, including Argon2. It has a salt field.
Or a very very old database system, possibly DB2, where you can’t change the column limits or data types after the fact.
If they’re hashing, the column size should be irrelevant. Ideally the database should never see the plaintext password in the first place (though I could understand calculating the hash in the query itself). If they’re not hashing, they should really be rewriting their database anyway.
I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: 16 Characters are sufficient and 20 pretty damn secure.
That is assuming they do stuff right and there are no vulnerabilities, which they won’t and there are. However they may manifest, they are a greater concern at 16+ characters, especially if they don’t offer 2FA.
The reason is that even if machines become powerful enough that 16 characters can be bruteforced, which they can’t atm, you can effectively defend everything against bruteforce attacks by other means. Including but not limited to limiting login attempts, salts and pepper, multiple encryption layers etc.
With just a salt you can make a 16 char password effectively a 24 char password… Or a 2.000.000 char password. Assuming it is not stolen alongside that is.
I tend to prefer pass phrases, they are a lot easier to type and speak, if required. Mine regularly blow past 20 characters.
As for salting, that only defends against rainbow table attacks. The salt needs to be stored along with the hash. That is find for most accounts, but once you’re in banking territory, that’s a bad bet.
You also can’t assume you have no vulnerabilities. If someone gets your database, you can’t defend against brute force attacks.
Lastly, if you are doing passwords properly, you shouldn’t care much about length. There are a few dos attacks to worry about, but a 512 char limit will stop those, and not limit any sane password.
Bcrypt and scrypt both have a byte limit of 72. That’s still enough for a secure passphrase, though some schemes might blow past it.
That’s not how salt works. It will be stolen alongside the password hash, because salt is necessarily in plaintext. It doesn’t increase the guessability of passwords. It just makes it infeasible to precompute your guesses.
So what does the password length matter if they also get the salt?
The actual length of the password isn’t the problem. If they were “doing stuff right” then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.
The fact that they’ve specified a limit is strong evidence that they’renot doing it right
Some hashing algorithms are suspectible to long password denial of service so it’s recommended to limit the length of password but certainly not to 20 characters but to a more reasonable limit, like 100 characters or so.
It does, I’ll give you that. However, I will hold the fact that their maximum is actually reasonable against that. The minimum of 8 is more concerning imo
Fuck1ngKil!M3
My bank used to not let me type one longer than six (6) characters!
My bank disables paste as has code checking if the browser is greater than Netscape Navigator 4.
Goddamn I really hate that shit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/
Removed by mod
Yup. My bank was even “translating” passwords to PINs behind the scene specifically so your password for the website would be the same as your password on the telephone.
Just wait until you get to Transunion’s site. It is a dumpster fire of consisting of the worst sign up I’ve ever seen, “Contact our social team” and "If you haven’t logged in for awhile create a new account. I could not believe how awful it was. I had to just call and do it over the phone.
Transunion was not too bad, and they did not require my full SSN, unlike Equifax. But transunion will not easily give me my credit score unlike the two Es.
